Disk storage operates inefficiently when a large number of memory seeks (searches) are necessary to fetch (read) or store (write) data objects from or to a disk storage device. This is typically because data objects that may be accessed in a relatively close temporal proximity to one another may have to be fetched from or stored in many different sectors of the memory associated with the storage device. Sectors and disk storage systems are well known in the art, e.g., as described in J. Hennessy et al., “Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach” 2nd ed., chapter 6 (sections 6.2 and 6.11), 1996, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein.
The accessing inefficiency of such conventional disk storage techniques result in a high processing overhead. This is a known problem with many databases and file systems. While, file systems may have a lower overhead than databases, file system performance can be quite poor for file creation and file deletion. High overhead can also be a serious problem for storage environments such as proxy caches on the World Wide Web, where data object creation and data object deletion constitute a significant fraction of request traffic.
Thus, there is a need for data storage techniques which address these inefficiency and overhead issues, as well as other related issues.